Deputy Chief of Intelligence Is Slain in Afghanistan

MEHTAR LAM, Afghanistan  The second-ranking intelligence official in Afghanistan was killed by a suicide bomber on Wednesday morning, in an explosion that killed at least 15 other people outside the main mosque here in the official’s hometown, officials and witnesses said.

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People gathered at the scene of the suicide bomb blast in the city of Mehtarlam where Afghanistan's second-ranking intelligence official was killed on Wednesday.

The New York Times

The intelligence official, Abdullah Laghmani, was the deputy director of Afghanistan’s National Directorate for Security and a prominent ally of President Hamid Karzai. Afghan officials and colleagues conceded that his death was a severe blow to the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

A spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan claimed responsibility within hours of the explosion. The spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said Taliban fighters had long sought to kill Mr. Laghmani, blaming him for detentions and jailings in Kandahar Province, where he was head of intelligence in the province, the Taliban’s heartland, from 2003 to 2004.

“We were looking for him for a long time, but today we succeeded,” Mr. Mujahid said.

The assassination of such a powerful member of the country’s security apparatus highlighted the overall lack of security in the country, even in cities like Mehtar Lam, where the Taliban have not carried out an attack of this scale before.

Two senior officials of Laghman Province were killed in the attack, as were a leading religious figure in the area and at least a dozen civilians, including three women. Mr. Laghmani was killed about 9:30 a.m. as he left the main mosque in the center of Mehtar Lam, the capital of Laghman Province, which is 60 miles east of Kabul. He had returned home during Ramadan and was helping to refurbish the mosque.

Mr. Laghmani was accustomed to mingling with people on his visits home, provincial officials said, and the bomber managed to catch him while his guard was down. He had just left the mosque, surrounded by a crowd of officials, security guards and local men. As he was getting into his armored sport utility vehicle, the suicide bomber ran toward him and detonated his explosives, said Lutfullah Mashal, the provincial governor.

The blast ripped away the passenger side of Mr. Laghmani’s vehicle and damaged one of his security contingent’s vehicles a few feet away. Shrapnel struck bystanders at a nearby marketplace and shredded a large poster of Mr. Laghmani posing with Mr. Karzai and provincial officials.

“In Laghman, he was regarded as a respected elder,” Mr. Mashal said. “But as an intelligence expert he knew a lot about Al Qaeda, and he was a person who was very actively fighting against the Taliban, against Al Qaeda, in the 34 provinces of Afghanistan. He was leading in managing most of the activities of this directorate, so his loss is really a major loss for the country, and especially for the province of Laghman.”

In Kabul, Mr. Karzai’s office released a statement describing Mr. Laghmani and the senior Laghman officials who were killed as “brave, hard-working and patriotic.”

Gen. Nur ul-Haq Ulumi, a retired military officer and a member of the Afghan Parliament’s defense committee, described Mr. Laghmani’s death as a “big loss for Afghanistan, especially for the security sector,” citing his experience and the network of relationships he had built over the years.

“When we lose people like him it shows that we are vulnerable,” General Ulumi said. “It is the weakness of our security organs that they are not organized enough to take care of their own security, especially when they are going among the public.”

Dr. Abdul Latif Qaumi, the head of public health in the province, said 16 people had been killed and 56 wounded, 20 of them critically. He said that the small 100-bed provincial hospital had been overwhelmed by the number of dead and wounded, and that some families might have taken dead relatives home for burial without notifying the local authorities. Sayed Ahmad Safi, a provincial spokesman, said that the death toll was 23, The Associated Press reported.

By midafternoon, gravediggers were already at work on a hillside outside the town.

Despite the Taliban’s claim of responsibility, Mr. Mashal, the provincial governor, said that the bombing was so brutal that foreign jihadists were probably involved. “I am sure it is extremists, these so-called global jihadists, and Al Qaeda has a definite hand behind this incident,” he said at the scene of the explosion.

Mr. Laghmani, who was in his 40s, served as an intelligence official with the Northern Alliance in the 1990s, when it opposed the Taliban government. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, he joined the Directorate of Security and served in Kandahar. He was later appointed deputy chief in charge of operations in eastern Afghanistan.

An ethnic Pashtun, he was particularly knowledgeable about the Taliban and the movement’s mentors in Pakistan. He and his agents helped determine the link between the bombers who attacked the Indian Embassy in Kabul in July 2008 and the Pakistani intelligence service, tracing a cellphone found in the wreckage to a facilitator in Kabul who was in direct telephone contact with a Pakistani intelligence official in Peshawar.

Pakistani officials repeatedly accused Mr. Laghmani of undermining their national security. The Pakistani government once asked Mr. Karzai to remove him from office and hand him over so he could face charges in Pakistan. Mr. Karzai declined the request.